Mongolian Pa and the Vocabulary That Arrived With Buddhism

The Mongolian religious vocabulary is heavily borrowed, and the borrowing came in layers. Buddhist terms entered by more than one route: some through Uyghur, which had a Buddhist literature before the Mongols did, some directly from Tibetan, and some from Sanskrit by way of Tibetan. Each route left a different phonetic shape on the same word, so the atlas of Mongolian Buddhist terminology contains doublets that are historically one word arriving twice. The alphabet was pressed hard by this. Sanskrit distinguishes aspirated from unaspirated stops and voiced from voiceless in a four way system that Mongolian does not have; Tibetan spelling preserves clusters that Mongolian cannot pronounce; Chinese contributes syllables with no Mongolian analogue at all.

The response was to add letters, ten of them at the end of the alphabet, and beyond those a further set of signs, encoded in Unicode under the name Ali Gali, for writing Sanskrit and Tibetan in full. From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the script carried a very large Buddhist literature in Mongolian, including a translation of the Kangyur, the canonical collection of the Buddha's discourses, and that literature is the main reason the extended apparatus exists at all.